Electronic commerce that utilizes the Internet to sell goods and services to customers has been increasing in its scope and scale at increasing rates. Merchants and other sellers of goods and services are increasingly in search of new mechanisms to locate interested buyers of these offered goods and services. At the same time, buyers using the Internet are similarly in need of more efficient and more effective mechanisms to locate sellers who are offering the goods and services of interest to these buyers.
One set of electronic commerce systems have permitted sellers to list items for sale on web servers that may be searches by interested buyers. These commerce systems, in many examples, offer auction listing and related sales assistance services to connect interested buyers with sellers offering the goods and services for sale. Sellers typically post listing for items that are available for searching by the buyers. These searches may operate as keyword searches on the item titles and item descriptions contained in the listings. These listings may also be organized into categories of similar items that may be browsed as buyers attempt to locate items of interest.
In many cases, buyers have difficulty in locating desired items from the large number of items contained in the listing. This difficulty occurs because of an inability to locate items using keyword searches. Sellers and buyers may use different terminology to describe the items, Search engines and related search strategies are typically simple matching of keywords that do not utilize more complex Boolean operations that may be used in more complex search systems. Buyers may not locate an item by browsing listings as well when sellers and buyers identify different categories are representing the items of interest.
In addition to problems with searching, many sellers do not list all of the items that they may possess. Sellers may not believe that a buyer may want to purchase the item. Additionally, listing fees and related charges may discourage sellers from posting listings when a low interest in the item exists. If these items are not listed, interested buyers cannot place bids and/or make offers to purchase the items from sellers wishing to get rid of the items.
These limitations of existing commerce systems limit the effectiveness of these systems to buyers and sellers as well as limit the number of listing posted on these systems. New mechanisms to connect interested buyers and sellers who use these commerce systems may address these limitations and thus increase on-line sales and corresponding profits for these sellers and commerce system operators.